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Documenting Internet blocking in Venezuela

Document Citado por Related
Vincent
AutorMarianne Díaz Hernández
Páginas68-71

Page 68

See note 30

Although Venezuela does not appear in global Internet censorship reports, the country has a history of questionable practices regarding content iltering and user persecution for their online activities. Despite what you may think, the history of Internet iltering practices in Venezuela are not anything recent: it dates from at least 2007, when the irst blocking of webpages were held by CANTV, the leading telecommunication company in the country, which was re-nationalized that year by President Hugo Chávez, who had just begun his third term.

From that year on, a series of practices (social media user detentions, blocking webpages by CANTV, controversial statements about social media inluence in national politic and stability) began to be commonly used. Two people (with very few followers and almost no inluence) were

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arrested in 2010 for writing on Twitter about the banking system, after a wave of interventions to inancial entities on charges of "destabilizing the banking system" in the country. After the 2011 parliamentary elections (when the Minister of Telecommunications shut down the Internet throughout the country for about thirty minutes, claiming that the action was taken "to avoid the hacking of the National Electoral Council website"), a citizen was arrested for allegedly posting a photo on Facebook of electoral material burnt (corresponding to a previous election), despite it was clear that the user had not been the source of the circulation of the photo – already massively shared in social media. Websites like Noticiero Digital and La Patilla were temporarily blocked several times by posting certain content, such as reporting on ighting in La Planta prison. In 2013, after President Chávez’s death, all.co domains (related to link shorteners such Twitter) were blocked for two days, in an attempt to prevent the online propagation of an alleged recording of Chávez.

However, the current president’s administration, Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’ successor, has brought his own policy on digital media, in all appearance a previous and redoubled version. Since November 2013, when Maduro announced on live national television his decision to block any website containing information on the price of the parallel dollar (leading to block of between 500 and 900 webpages by CONATEL), his policy regarding this issue was clear. While blocking websites on the so-called "black dollar" goes back many years (with exchange...

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